Evaluate the usefulness of Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) work for understanding children’s friendship’ v.1

One of the most prominent exploration about children’s understanding of friendship was conducted by Brian Bigelow and John La Gaipa in the 1970’s. Friendship is seen differently in children, especially the younger ones, as they grow older children becomes more complex as well as the meaning of friendship. This essay will first outline Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) study on understanding children’s friendship. Secondly, it will outline the approach of their study looking at the research method they used. Lastly, it will attempt to evaluate the usefulness of their work and look as well as providing an overview on the influence of culture to the children’s relationship of friendship. Finally, it will provide a short summary of the points made and it will attempt to conclude the usefulness of the study. Understanding friendship with young people is more complex than just defining what the concept means. As they mature, the qualities on a search for a friend becomes more profound. At that time it was an under-research issue in Psychology. Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) used an unconventional research approach to other previous research studies, instead of doing observations or administering questionnaires they collected their data in written form. Initially, the focus of Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) research was to understand children’s emotional relationship and what attracts them from one another (Brownlow, C. , 2012). In order to understand the idea, the two researchers looked at the distinction of friendship on several stages of child development. They collected a large sample of 480 written essays from sixty children (30 girls and 30 boys) between six and fourteen years from upper-working class and lower-middle class homes in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (Brownlow, C. , 2012, p. 242). The importance of doing it this way is because children, especially the young ones are able to express themselves better in writing form than expressing themselves out loud. Before they started their investigation, they came up with a list of twenty-one friendship expectations. The gathered data was qualitative in nature. In order to assess the details, they used Content Analysis which was used to examine written, audio, visual materials that identify and counts the significant information that was useful in answering a query (Brownlow, 2012, p. 243). This was done to count the occurrence of each expectation which was also referred to as frequency count. Moreover, the researchers were able to transform the qualitative data into quantitative data through frequency counts (Brownlow, 2012, p. 245). Interestingly, Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) found some important differences in the children’s expectations of friendship. Sixteen out of the original twenty-one expectations were more persistent based on the older children’s description in contrast to the younger ones (Brownlow, 2012, p. 243). This indicates that the children’s expectations of a best friend become more sophisticated as they mature. Then, they were able to compare the written essays to their list and used frequency counts to look for patterns in their data that would be useful in understanding about the changing nature of friendship in children. Not only that, they were also able to compare the samples in order to see the differences between boys and girls as well as younger and older children. They found that in general, by comparison of gender the difference is insignificant. For example, in an organised play boys tend to have more expectations than girls (Brownlow, 2012, p. 244). Philip Erwin (1988) noted that as children mature the importance of friendship changes. He also argued that peers act as a powerful source of support for them cited in (Brownlow, 2012, pp. 240-241) while younger children mostly rely on parents for support and guidance, this is true on most occasions as parents are their first contact for help and comfort. Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) proposed a three-stage model of development of friendship expectations. The first stage looks at the significance of shared activities such as sports (for boys), the possibility of interacting with each other, such as hanging out at the park or each other’s houses, so geographically closeness is very important. *An example of this can be found on the teenagers discussion on friendship, one of the teenagers said that he wouldn’t necessarily hang out with the people he doesn’t see very often so he doesn’t consider them as best mates (The Open University, 2019) *. The second stage focuses on the transition of individual needs such as sharing confidential information about themselves, loyalty and commitment to each other. At this point they were able to make judgement on the level of friendship they will have. The third stage emphasizes the importance of commonness in attitudes, values and interests and the possibility of starting an intimate relationship as well as confiding. Children at this stage have a very specific criteria in acknowledging a best friend. Listening to the teenagers discussion online, teenager 1 said that he wouldn’t necessarily confide in someone who he doesn’t know well enough like someone at college (The Open University, 2019). Obviously, the level of friendship is different at this point, the best mates are the ones he can confide in and hang out more often as opposed to the ones that just say hi every now and then. Bigelow and La Gaipa’s (1975) research helped gain an insight on understanding what the meaning of friendship for children really means. Furthermore, it supplied evidence regarding the children’s friendship and how it becomes more complex as they grow older. Their decision to transform data from qualitative to quantitative data raised some questions such as preservation of the children’s accounts and the possibility of doing it differently without losing more details. However, It is important to remember that they came up with predetermined friendship expectations that were later used for comparison rather than individualised features. Moreover, they wanted to make generalisations about children’s friendship and develop a model that could be used in the wider population. It is also possible that there were some expectations that they might have missed such as the influence of culture in children’s expectations of friendship. One advantage of using this technique is that it illustrates how to transform a large sample of qualitative data to quantitative data using content analysis. In conclusion, the work of Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) has shown importance in understanding the changing nature of friendship in children through the three-stage model of development in friendship expectations they develop using content analysis. Their contribution to research methods has been very useful and influential because it introduced the concept to the research on children’s relationships. Their research study of children raised some questions on accuracy and reliability, however, with the evidence they provided they were able to prove that the purpose of this method was to make generalisations therefore it can be used in a wider population.